


Run Away With Me?

by walkingtr4vesty



Category: All Time Low
Genre: Guitar, Insomnia, M/M, Music, Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:04:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingtr4vesty/pseuds/walkingtr4vesty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jack has never understood Alex’s insomnia. To him, sleep is a necessity not to be taken for granted. He can crash for hours after school, if he wants. And they say Jack’s the wild one. "</p>
<p>Alex always sleeps at Jack's house, even when he can't sleep at his own. He always sleeps at Jack's house, until tonight, where there are far more exciting things to do than sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Away With Me?

**Author's Note:**

> Second one in two days! Again I promise I'm not intentionally insulting anyone, taking advantage of anything or trying in any way to offend anyone/thing. Lots of song lines drifting through this :')

Alex pulls the blanket up to his chin and stares at the sleeping Jack. He looks so peaceful… so happy. Jack likes sleep. Alex would probably love sleep too, if he ever got any.   
Jack has never understood Alex’s insomnia. To him, sleep is a necessity not to be taken for granted. He can crash for hours after school, if he wants. And they say Jack’s the wild one. 

Out of Jack and Alex, Alex has always been the troubled one. The depressed one. The one everyone knows the story of. The one with the brave face. The one who doesn’t care normally, but when he does it really fucking hurts. 

It hurts Jack too, and he understands perhaps more than Alex thinks. It worries him when Alex doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t talk. All those things a normal human being (ok, a Jack human being) needs in order to survive. 

Seventy percent of the time Alex is just as high on life as Jack. They’re the ones that prank Rian and Zack, the ones that drink all the time, go to all the parties. And then Alex has a comedown and he won’t speak for days, and Jack tries to get him to sleep but Alex won’t sleep. He tells Jack in a croaky voice that it’s worse when he’s asleep. 

It’s always Jack. It could easily be Zack or Rian, or some other friend that spends a lot of time with him. They all understand him. But it’s unofficially Jack’s job to let him sleep round, to make him shit pancakes when he feels down, to get him to drink himself silly just so he’ll sleep for a few hours. Jack knows this, Alex knows this, they all know this. 

Alex works himself too hard. When he gets drunk he doesn’t stop. He digs his little pit deeper and deeper. He’s a mess. Alcohol, Jack’s blankets and music have sort of glued him together. But the cracks go deeper than that. Jack understands this more than anyone. 

Alex only sleeps at Jack’s house. The insomnia, the nightmares… they’re worse at home. They don’t exist at Jack’s. Except tonight. It’s not fear tonight though… it’s happiness. Alex likes watching Jack sleep. 

Hey, that’s creepy. 

To Alex, watching Jack sleep is as good as actually sleeping. He sleeps so… rhythmically. He lies on his side, facing away from Alex, breathing in and out every three seconds (Alex counts) and not moving. Jack sleeping is calming. 

Alex has never needed sleep. Then when his brother died, it just got worse, because he didn’t want to sleep. But he’s getting back to the point now where he just doesn’t need it anymore. Sometimes.

But then Jack sits up, suddenly wide awake and stares at Alex in confusion. 

“I thought you slept at my house?” he asks. “Isn’t that the point?”

Alex shrugs. “Yeah. Not tonight.”

“Alex, I want you to sleep,” Jack replies, running a hand through his impressive skunk hair. “You look ill.”

“Alright mum,” Alex grins cheekily. He’s always wide awake at this time. He might be knackered by two o’clock the next day, but midnight is when the insomniacs are just getting started. When Alex is just waking up.

“Seriously,” Jack says. He’s worried about Alex. 

Alex sighs. “I can’t Jack. I don’t care. I’m just not tired.”

“Well make yourself tired!” Jack suggests. His understanding is only limited after all… no one really knows what it’s like to be Alex Gaskarth. 

“I can’t!” Alex insists. 

Jack sighs, and runs a hand through his hair again. “Ok.” He tries a different approach. “What do you want to do, you not-sleeping bastard?”

There’s a light in Alex’s eyes that hasn’t been there in a while. Jack feels like it’s his job to keep it there. To not put it out. 

“Can we go up on the roof?” Alex asks excitedly, sounding a little like a six year old. Although six year old Alex had a remarkably British accent. In fact, Alex’s British accent is still   
Jack’s most favourite thing in the whole world. 

“Yeah, alright,” Jack agrees, finally able to grin at his best friend. He wants to be helping him, and maybe he’s helping more by agreeing to go up on the roof, than he is when he forces Alex to sleep. 

Alex pushes off Jack’s spare blankets, and pulls a t-shirt over his head – a Blink-182 one in fact – because it’s possibly a bit cold to go outside without one. He unlocks Jack’s window and opens it as far as it will go, before stepping out onto the windowsill and hoisting himself up onto the red tiles. In that small moment when Alex is standing on the windowsill, barefoot, with just a grey t-shirt and checked pajama pants on, Jack feels like he could mistake Alex for some sort of beautiful angel who appeared in the dead of night. 

In some ways Alex is a beautiful angel. But angels are supposed to be pure, and whole, and Alex is unfortunately neither of those things. Although in Jack’s eyes, he’s still pretty freakin’ perfect. 

When Jack is certain that Alex is safely on the roof and he’s not going to get in the way of Jack’s climb up, he too rolls out of bed and climbs out onto the windowsill, hoisting himself up the same way Alex did. The roof is their place. Whether it’s Jack’s roof or Alex’s. Sloped or flat. They both love being up high, but there aren’t too many trees that will accommodate for a Treehouse and/or two teenage boys who are still at the awkward ‘too many limbs’ stage. And Jack’s fallen out of more trees than he cares to count. 

So Alex and Jack take refuge on roofs. 

Jack crawls across the tiles precariously, until he can ease himself into a sitting position next to Alex, who looks so comfortable up there that Jack almost believes Alex was born to fly. He then realises that Alex wasn’t, and he has to remember that if Alex does try, as angelic as he’d look, Jack absolutely has to stop him. 

Although Alex, for all his faults, is definitely not suicidal, and will not try to fly. Jack knows this very well. 

“The stars are really clear tonight,” Alex murmurs, lying back with his hands behind his head to get a closer look.   
Jack can’t even help what he says next. “Let me tell you something my father told me. Look at the stars. The great kings of the past look down on us from those stars.”   
He was hoping Alex would play along though. 

“Really?” Alex asks, and Jack breathes an inner sigh of relief. 

“Yes. So whenever you feel alone, just remember that those kings will always be there to guide you. And so will I.”

They sit in silence for a moment, contemplating life, before Alex speaks again. “Jack?”

“Alex?”

“I’m not completely fucked up, you know. Right now, at home in the clouds, I feel completely happy.”

“I know, Lex,” Jack replies. “I know you’re not as messed up as you want people to think. I know you pretty well. But, you know, you’re not alone.”

Alex sighs, because deep down he knows he’s not, but often he feels he is. “I don’t feel alone now?” he offers. 

“Yeah. I know dude. Aw, shit, I hate giving advice.”

“Well, I feel more alone now,” Alex grins, and Jack shoves him in the shoulder playfully. They’re sort of skirting round a couple of fragile topics that Jack knows he should broach with his best friend, but the problem is that Alex isn’t normally like this and when he is, Jack wants to savour it. Because he’s selfish. 

“Have you got your guitar?” Alex asks a moment later. 

“Well, duh.”

“I sort of mean, go and get your guitar,” Alex grins. 

“Fine. Don’t fall off the roof when I’m gone.”

“I intend not to,” Alex replies dryly, and Jack scrambles back in through the window to fetch his most prized possession ever; his acoustic guitar. 

Two minutes later he’s back sitting next to Alex, who didn't fall off the roof, and Alex rests his head on Jack’s shoulder because there are literally no boundaries between the two of them. “Play something?”

“Like what?” Jack asks, because not meaning to brag but he has memorised pretty much the whole of the Green Day discography to date, and that’s just the beginning of it. 

“Blink. Um… play Always.”

Alex can play guitar almost as well as Jack, but it’s Jack’s guitar and Jack tends not to let people touch his guitar. Not even his closest friends. 

“I’ll play if you sing.”

“Fair ‘nuff.” 

This seemed kind of soppy to both boys. They weren’t usually soppy, it was probably the stars, and the late hour, and everything. But as Jack starts to play, and Alex joins in singing, everything just seems so right. 

Jack finishes, and Alex suddenly has a burning question that wasn’t there before, and that he’ll probably never ask again. 

“Run away with me?”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lex, you’re gonna need to give me more than that.”

Alex shakes his head in confusion. “Yeah, I just… when we’re on our own I swear nothing else matters. And I just… I thought that might happen if we were always on our own.”

Jack completely appreciates Alex’s train of thought, because he can’t deny that he’d like it too. 

“You know… If we had absolutely nothing else to worry about, if we weren’t leaving anyone behind, I’d say yes straight away,” Jack says softly. “If I could, I really would, Alex.”

“Yeah,” Alex replies, just as softly. “I understand. I mean… it doesn’t matter because we wouldn’t have run away anyway. But…”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees. And suddenly their quiet, best friends moment is completely interrupted by a loud bang.

“The fuck was that?” Jack almost shouts, only just remembering that the rest of the neighbourhood will be asleep at three am.

Alex crawls to the edge of the gutter and hangs his head down to have a look. “The window’s shut,” he informs Jack gravely. “I guess it was the wind.”

“Aw, shit,” Jack exclaims. “It only opens from the inside.”

Alex begins to laugh, and seconds later Jack is laughing too. It’s not nearly as funny as one would think, from the tears pouring down their cheeks, but everything’s funny at this   
time. And everything’s funnier with your best friend. And Jack has his best friend right now, so everything is ten million times better. 

“We’re stuck up here then?” Alex asks eventually. 

“Yup,” Jack replies cheerfully. “Hey, Lex?”  
“Mm-hmm?”

“I’ll run away with you just for tonight.”

“Seems like you don’t have a choice,” Alex replies with a straight face, and then he cracks up again. 

“That was not funny at all,” Jack sighs in the way a teacher might. “Leave the jokes to me man.”

“Er, why do you get to be the funny one?”

“Because I am the funny one, you twat.”

“I don’t think so,” Alex replies, and they begin to bicker loudly, just like they did before Alex shut himself away. Everything tonight has been just like it was before Alex shut himself away. 

Two hours later, neither boy is asleep yet. They’ve had rousing choruses of Blink-182, Green Day and even bands like Nirvana, because Alex has worked out that no one’s waking up, and Jack has worked out that he doesn’t care. They’ve made all the dick jokes and ‘your mom’ jokes that the world has to offer, and they’ve both almost fallen off the roof more than once. 

At one point, Jack even let’s Alex play his guitar, although instead of continuing with their punk rave session (if headbanging to punk on the roof can be considered a rave in anyway), Alex shyly plays Jack a song that he wrote himself which, after much consideration, they named ‘Lullabies’ between them. Jack doesn’t cry at music, but hearing his best friend sing in a slightly cracked voice that hasn’t been used for singing in a while, about something that Alex never speaks about, but seems to be able to sing about, does bring a lump to Jack’s throat. 

He may never experience it himself, but he reckons that music, and being in the band and everything, is the thing that’s keeping Alex hanging on. In many ways music has saved him. 

They stay up to watch the sunrise, both shivering by this time because neither boy was wearing any more than a t-shirt and pajama pants. Alex was lying back against the tiles because his arse had got sore, which Jack affectionately diagnosed as ‘too much bumming’, which caused Alex to laugh for ages. And then suddenly, without warning, the sun was up and the day had begun and Alex had decided that he preferred night to day, and he was beginning to retreat into himself again, like a nocturnal animal. Jack lay back next to him, his guitar resting on his chest and turned so he was facing his best mate. 

“Lex?”

“Mm-hmm?” Alex asked. 

“You should get some sleep now. I won’t go anywhere.”

“It’s not that, it’s just…”

“Just what?” Jack prompted, feeling like he was getting somewhere.

“I don’t know,” Alex brushed it off. “Nightmares, I guess.”

“I’ll protect you!” Jack volunteers cheesily. “Just sleep. Just for an hour, Lex. Please?”

Jack didn’t even have to wait for an answer, because Alex’s eyes shut, and his breathing slows rhythmically, and finally, for the first time in far too long, he’s dead to the world. For once, it was Jack who was watching Alex sleep, not the other way round. 

He wasn’t sure what Alex had been about to say, although he knew he hadn’t finished his sentence the way he thought he would. Jack was left up on the roof with a sleeping, wrecked best friend, a beautiful acoustic guitar, and the line ‘sing me to sleep’, floating round and round his head.


End file.
